Simon Palenski journeys home to fossick through Ōtautahi’s secondhand bookshops offerings.

After finishing undergraduate studies and dropping out of post-graduate studies, I spent almost two years working at Pegasus Books in Wellington. My manager there, John, used to frequently tell me about how before the earthquakes, Christchurch was the best city in the country for secondhand bookshops. This was only a few years after they had happened, and the situation in the city for second-hand bookshops then was bleak.

These days, like everything else in Christchurch, what has taken shape since the earthquakes is a bit random. The secondhand bookshops that have, against all odds, emerged from the rubble do not have the same robust and dignified feeling as before. They feel provisional, spread out, fringe-dwelling, like the unusual shrubby species of plants that quickly monopolise and thrive in the areas of land that have been clear-felled of an ancient forest. There isn’t a single brick and mortar second-hand bookshop that I could find within the four avenues. Does that mean “proper” secondhand bookshops, like Smith’s – how it lingers in the corners of people’s memories – are an extinct species in the city now?

I would argue yes. But I would also argue that the secondhand bookshop ecosystem, becoming established across the suburbs, is weirder and harder to navigate but also more interesting, and offers real value to those who seek it out.

Full disclosure: I don’t actually live in Christchurch, but it’s my home town and I visit pretty often and usually make the rounds to at least one of these shops each time I do.

8. Smith’s Bookshop

I feel guilty putting Smith’s at the bottom of this list. It has to be done though. Since the earthquakes Smith’s has shifted from being the kind of shop I remember visiting as a teenager, the crowning glory of Christchurch’s secondhand bookshops, with towering shelves heaving with books over three floors, to a bookshop that mostly sells new coffee table books and secondhand books that appeal only to the train spotters that collect obscure, long-out-of-print volumes on subjects such as wheat mills of Canterbury. There is a shelf or two of Penguin classics, a half-hearted gesture really. But I’d recommend only coming here if you need, in a hurry, a first-edition, near mint copy of a book like A History of Printing in New Zealand 1830-1940 and are willing to pay $$$$ for it.

7. Hornby Books

Hornby Books is out of the way, in an area now known for malls, big-box retail, freight trucks bypassing Christchurch and Dress Smart, where everyone goes to buy discounted sneakers. It’s incredible, really, that it’s somehow still there, unchanged in the same humble block of roadside shops. Is it worth the trip? Well, it perfectly fits the mould of a typical New Zealand suburban bookshop. Musty shelves brimming with romance, crime, thrillers and mysteries, a well-established local culture of buying, reading and returning to trade in for the next one. Talkback on the radio. Who knows, if you find yourself in Hornby for some reason, why not pop in? Someday I’m sure, the land-hungry retail giants surrounding it will swallow it up.

6. Reverie Booksellers and King’s Books & Stamps

Both can be found in the Edgeware/St Albans area and are pretty similar. Reverie used to be called Edgeware Paperback Centre but it has new owners now, and the facade has been given a fresh paint job and the inside a spring clean and a slight rejig. I had no idea King’s existed until my friend, who joined me for this part of my fact-finding trip, pointed it out. Like Hornby Books, these are bookshops catering mostly to the kind of reader who consumes genre fiction with the ferocity of a woodchipper. I’d been told the science-fiction/fantasy and children’s sections of these two aren’t bad. My friend who came along with me, and is an expert in second-hand offerings for each, wasn’t disappointed (he found books by Dave Eggers, Emily St. John Mandel and John Bellairs). Overall, King’s is the better of the two. Prices there are more affordable, and the general quality of books is better. The kind of place that will turn up the odd gem.

5. Steadfast Books

Steadfast deserves to be higher on this list. If it wasn’t me writing this with my own weird ideas about what constitutes a worthwhile trip to a secondhand bookshop, it’d be somewhere in the top three. It’s well organised, it has a good range of books and the prices are very reasonable (around $6-12 for a paperback). The location is a strange one. Among a bevy of car yards, Steadfast looks out from a squat building right on the corner of the high-octane intersection of Ferry and Ensors Rd. On first impressions, it would seem to be one of the most unlikely places in the city for a secondhand bookshop. But this spot, for reasons perhaps of sheer affordability compared to somewhere quieter and more charming, has become a haven for them. A newly found niche, a “precinct” even, that Steadfast shares with another, which we’ll get to.

4. Dove Bookshop

Dove Bookshop is a charity front raising funds for St Christopher’s Church and you can find it deep in the north-west suburbs. For a charity shop, Dove is highly organised, with alphabetised sections for fiction, classics, science-fiction, children’s, thrillers, biographies, merchandised tables of new arrivals and so on. What makes it worth the trip out there to Bishopdale Mall, a 1960s relic, Ministry of Works, outdoor, pedestrian, shopping arcade of oddball businesses surrounded by limitless carparking, is that books here are criminally cheap ($3-7), and the selection is often as good, if not better, than most of the other secondhand bookshops. Part of the fun is that you’ll never be able to guess what you’ll find here. I once came across the complete works of Samuel Beckett in beautiful, old John Calder and Grove editions for about $3 a pop. It also has a top-shelf selection of New Zealand authors, old and new. Worth a trip, if you have an afternoon with nothing else better to do and you feel like taking a gamble.

3. Custard Square Bookshop

Custard Square is the sole secondhand bookshop holding out in the central city. It gets its name from the wee custard-coloured, parked up caravan it runs from at the Arts Centre. The shop is packed full of literary-leaning fiction with sub-sections of gardening, cooking and children’s books, all for $5 and picked with a keen eye. Cathleen and Tony, who run it, are the purest souls in the whole city. If you’re in town and need something to read but don’t have a book or a library card on hand, Custard Square is there to help.

2. London Street Bookshop

On the main street of Lyttelton is London Street Bookshop, easily the most bookish bookshop in the city. This is the place to go if you’re after second-hand literature and you can’t be bothered trawling through piles of potential dross. The fiction is spread across about half a dozen parts of the shop so if you’re looking for a specific author you have to comb through the whole thing – which is probably a working strategy to sell more books. Their prices are reasonable, more expensive than Steadfast, and definitely more than Custard Square and the charity ones, at around $12 or so. But they always have a great range of books, old and new, whenever I visit, and their poetry section is stacked as well. Definitely recommend a trip out to Lyttelton for this one, also because on the way you could stop off at…

1. Book Barn on Ferry

Book Barn on Ferry is the most extreme version of a secondhand bookshop anyone reading this is likely to encounter. The decision of whether to go to say London Street Bookshop or the Book Barn on Ferry is like that scene in The Matrix where Neo has to choose between the blue pill or the red pill. Peace, comfort, security? Or the truth? In putting Book Barn on Ferry at number one, I choose the truth. Truth because the Book Barn on Ferry reduces secondhand book selling down to its purest, most abstract essence. Yes, when you walk in you’re likely to be immediately face to face with stacked banana boxes filled with yet-to-be-sorted books, and yes if you can somehow squeeze your way past this into some kind of bookshop establishment, it’ll dawn on you that the shop keeps going, and going, gradually losing all sense of order, bending closer towards chaos until you’re finally met by a solid wall of stacked banana boxes filled with more unsorted books.

Book Barn on Ferry is right next to Steadfast, and it’s an offshoot of the Chertsey Book Barn – basically the same kind of shop, but inside an old grain shed on the side of the highway between Christchurch and Ashburton. If you’re the kind of person who gets a thrill not from finding what you’re looking for, but (maybe) finding what you don’t know that you’re looking for, this is the bookshop for you! It’s essentially a permanent book fair open seven days a week, with book fair prices of $2-5 per book. Sometimes you go here and you look and look and find nothing at all and it’s a total waste of time, and sometimes you walk in and come away with an unbelievable stash. I like the sheer randomness of what comes into this shop: books on bridges in Britain and barns in Wisconsin, the untouched rows of Jean M. Auel, Doris Lessing shelved in the new age section, dictionaries for any language you could ever imagine, immense slab-sized hardbacks on herons of the world, a box filled with someone’s collection of obscure art photography and witchcraft books and, usually, surprisingly good fiction. It’s actually decently organised, with its own logic underlying it all considering the mind-bending amount of books that they seem to have coming in. So there are “sections” you can browse, if you’re after specific things. On my research visit for this article, I told myself I could buy more than I usually might, for the sake of making this interesting, and I ended up with half a dozen unexpected and completely random, though great, books. If it gets too much you could always exhale and nip next door to Steadfast, where things are less full on.

Honourable mention: Best Books

Best Books is run by two artists, Holly Best and Tony de Lautour, and every now and again they’ll set up somewhere and throw a mini book fair. Like Custard Square, all the books are handpicked and cost a flat amount (it was $4 last time I saw). But the best thing about Best Books is that Holly and Tony are excellent readers, and they’ll happily recommend and talk about each book you pick up and show them or they notice you looking at. Holly leans towards writers à la Jane Bowles and Kathryn Scanlan, while Tony will have a new thing each time; whether that be books about shipwrecks of the southern ocean, histories of the FBI, or Graham Greene. Worth seeking them out if you’re lucky enough that their rare occurrence aligns for you.